> Wright claimed in 2016 that he was Nakamoto, which was a pseudonym. The claim has been disputed.
It's beyond disputed; the man can literally sign a message at any point in time that he likes that would definitively prove his claim, and he refuses. This to me is proof positive that he is lying. Someone who built a cryptosystem for artificial digital scarcity, who relied entirely on digital signatures to prove pseudonymous identity would absolutely 100% prove their claim using these methods. Craig Wright is an obvious fraud.
The article is not very informative about the case, I'd love to know more about why some bitcoin mined by satoshi nakamoto, supposedly owned by a man claiming to be satoshi nakamoto, was under the possession of someone else and needed a trial to return possession to him.
It's beyond beyond disputed: Wright was forced by the court to provide a sworn list of his bitcoin holdings as of 2013, and when he provided a list, immediately people owning thousands of Bitcoins came out of the woodwork signing messages with addresses Wright claimed to own calling Wright a fraud. https://cswarchive.info/csw-filed#145-Signings
So it isn't just that if it were true he could trivially prove it with a digital signature-- but that the true owners of many coins he claimed to control have stepped up and provided signatures saying that they're not Wright!
Unfortunately, Wright and his conspirators are spending millions to support and prolong their fraud and so it's no great difficulty for them to more or less control the media presentation of the situation.
$100m judgement, he may settle it (vs deal with appeals) for a different amount.
Wright has scored some extremely wealthy sponsors who have been loaning wright money in exchange for a share in his fictional treasure. So I think it's possible that he'll actually be able to pay for a settlement in this case using their money.
It's an astronomical amount of money, but the amounts of money being pumped into wrights con have been astronomical for a long time. $100m wouldn't even be particularly disproportionate compared to what's gone into propping up TAAL, for example.
It's also possible-- even likely-- that he just won't pay it. I believe he still owes $60k-ish for a judgement for legal fees in an action in Norway, which he's owed for well over a year. He went over a year before paying legal fees he owed Adam Back for an aborted defamation lawsuit against Back.
Civil recovery can be spotty at the best of times, and in this case we're talking about someone whos already fled one country to escape his legal problems and has established citizenship in a location known to block extraditions for criminals (including Wright's business partner / primary victim, Calvin Ayre who spent a decade on DHS's most wanted list).
I recently read The Greatest Hoax on Earth and my takeaway was the incredible extent to which bumbling pathological liars like Frank Abagnale or CW can build credibility through sheer persistence.
It's really super fascinating. Also many people are never taken and see that it's fake all along, even blowing the whistle but it just gets ignored. It often seems to take a long time for scams like this to really collapse.
Or, I should say I'd find it fascinating if I weren't a target and a victim of it. :( being forced to live it is less than fun.
I wonder if we'll ever figure out who Satoshi is/was. I'd love to know.
On the other hand, I do want to respect their wish to stay anonymous.
Whomever that person is, it must feel very weird. They either still have access to the private keys and are, on paper at least, in the top 10 richest people in the world. Or they no longer have access to the keys and must feel some form of "loss".
Or it was never a person and always an organisation. So many unknowns :-)
There must have been countless investigations into this. Journalists, governments, shady organisations. It's hard to imagine no-one has uncovered Satoshi yet.
It's an interesting dilemma. Satoshi has billions in Bitcoin, but moving any of it would shock its value. They either haven't cashed out because they truly believe in Bitcoins principles, or they cannot.
> and are, on paper at least, in the top 10 richest people in the world.
That kind of wealth in Bitcoin is a strange case. After a certain point, money doesn't mean anything material and comes closer to a proxy for measuring power.
Typically, people who are worth tens of billions have a lot of power. A big voting stake in a huge tech company is, these days, probably more power than a senior US senator.
What does $50B in bitcoin mean (regardless of whether it'd be possible to liquidate)? It's an interesting question.
I think it was most likely Hal Finney. He's cryogenically frozen himself, so most likely dead, hence it is unlikely his coins will ever be recovered. Unless perhaps he's stored the key somewhere in the physical world (or a mnemonic), so that he could retrieve in the case of successfully being "revived". If that's the case, someone might find it, perhaps.
Back in the Correct Horse Battery Staple days and earlier, when password managers were still nonexistent or frowned upon, I used to recommend that if you had an executive that has trouble remembering passwords, they should use a phrase from a book in their office (make sure they have more than a couple of books in their office).
For all we know somewhere there's a wallet whose password is the first sentence from Moby Dick, or one of Hamlet's speeches.
It was never unusual for cypherpunks to use nyms. Amongst the many ideological and practical reasons, for example worries about if authorities would treat a creation and its creator hostilely — it separates the creator from the creation and lets you judge the creation purely on its own merits (whatever those may, or may not, be).
I do appreciate your curiosity, but thank you for understanding. To date, to my knowledge, no-one ever guessed correctly, and maybe that's for the best. If they'd have wanted anyone to know who they were: they'd have said. They never have, and likely never will. I don't think you'll ever see anything from the genesis block or those keys. It's got to feel incredibly strange, yes, but remember: they _wanted_ to walk away from the whole thing, and I feel strongly that deserves respect.
I don't think it's that had to figure if you look into it but people don't like to say as the guy obviously wants a bit of anonymity. It's not that no one's uncovered Satoshi so much as they have uncovered about a dozen possible ones.
It could be anyone,and it need not be a single person, it could be a consortium. I've speculated that it could be the US govt that invented bitcoin for all we know.
Here we have someone claiming to be the creator of a cryptocurrency and the owner of a large balance in a distributed ledger in a court of law (!), in front of a judge and a jury., while journalists at a reputable organization reporting on the trial are trying to figure out whether this person is being truthful or not. And of course, there isn't even a single mention of "private key" in the article.
Yikes.
We live in a world in which the vast majority of people -- including the vast majority of judges and journalists -- lack the education necessary for understanding the fundamental building blocks of modern computer security. They do not understand, cannot explain, and cannot reason about public-key cryptography. The notion of "proving ownership publicly by signing a sequence of bits with a private key" is utterly foreign to them. Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education.
> Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education.
Not so fast. A trial with this large an amount at stake goes to a pretty senior judge. Blaming the public educational system of, say, 1975 for not teaching private key is... a bit misguided. (If they came out of the public school system in 2010, I could see your case. But I'd bet the judge of this case didn't...)
It's far worse than that... because the journalism falls down well before it gets into the hightech stuff.
This case wasn't even over Wright being Satoshi or anything like that. And the outcome of the case was that the jury apparently didn't believe wright's claims of creating or mining bitcoin.
They found Wright civilly liable for $100 million in damages for raiding his dead friends business by impersonating it in AU court, which he essentially admitted to in court (though obfuscated by claiming it was normal business practices to engage in sham lawsuits against yourself).
So all this stuff about Satoshi this and that are pretty much entirely incidental to the court, and to the extent it came up at all the jury didn't fall for it. This is entirely the opposite view you'd get from the mass media articles because they're all parroting lightly "balanced" press releases from Wright.
Can someone with a bit more background or understanding give me an ELI5 as to what Wright is doing / gets from this? I'm assuming the 1.1m bitcoin refers to whatever Satoshi was meant to have mined? Which I assumed was 'lost'?
Not really a crypto person, just very curious and the article is lacking detail! Thanks!
He is using the legal system to claim Satoshis coins. And also extract royalties from anyone using the "Bitcoin database" which he claims he owns the copyright to (the code has an MIT license). He and his loser friend Calvin Ayre (a washed up 90s dot com online gambling exit billionaire) are pushing "Bitcoin SV" as the real Bitcoin. It is both tragic and pathetic.
In this situation, if he had lost, he would have owed his "business partner" half of the 1.1m BTC. Since he's not Satoshi and doesn't have access to billions of dollars, losing this trial would have meant he owed tons of money he didn't actually have.
That's not how this would work... I lost ~1,000 BTC and ~10,000 LTC in ~2011. I couldn't write it off at even the current value at the time if I wanted to write it off I would have to write it off at my cost basis which is the value when I mined them which was barely 50 dollars iirc. That's what my tax guy said at least if this is wrong let me know because I won't ever be paying capital gains tax again if I can write it off at current value.
Wright's past tax scam is a bit more subtle than what you and (probably) the prior poster imagine.
AU has a program where if you spend money on R&D you can get a refundable tax credit-- not just a deduction, but like EITC in the US they'll actually cut you a check.
Wright spun up a collection of companies that engaged in no business (or research) except claiming these tax credits. According to his own companies documentation, all in all he claimed to have performed $200m in research and requested $65m in credits. The first year he attempted this he did it with smaller values and they paid out, but in later years he tripped audit alarm bells.
The AU tax office immediately started asking where he got the $200 million that he claims he spent on research. This is the origin of Wright claiming to have invented Bitcoin: he claimed he had some enormous trove of bitcoin's held overseas and that his companies were funded by taking out loans against them. Wright made a massive amount of forgeries to support his claims across a couple years of fighting with the ATO.
The tax office thoroughly debunked and discredited wright's lies and forgeries and found against him, ordering him to repay the money. At that point Wright took the show on the road, literally: He fled AU while the police were raiding his offices, and started selling shares of his fictional fortune and fictional intellectual property to others in order to cover the AU clawback and finance his lifestyle.
Since then his life has been a series of forced moves, lie after lie in a growing snowball to delay the collapse of his con. For example, for a while he held off his "investors" (victims) by claiming that the Bitcoins were in trust and would be delivered by a bonded courier in Jan 2020 (like that scene in back to the future 2) -- but after that date came and went he claimed that the coins were delivered by were stolen from him by hackers that hid a wifi pineapple in his home and that now he's going to get them back by suing Bitcoin developers to backdoor the system to return them to him.
Yeah the cost basis analysis sounds correct. You have to realize gains, and pay taxes on them, before subsequent losses would be deductible. (Or else you have to start from a higher basis and lose money, and realize those losses.) This works the same with traditional financial instruments.
> In a case that was promptly labelled "bogus" by one defendant, Craig Wright is demanding that developers allow him to retrieve around 111,000 bitcoin held at two digital addresses that he does not have private keys for.
In a related case, he's trying to get them to 'give' him the Bitcoin he doesn't have a key for. Weird sort of thing. It sounds unlikely that any fork that permits this would have any sort of support.
I read part of it but it looks like they mined a huge bunch of BTC and put it in a trust and the Kleiman side argued that Wright impersonated him (in some way, didn't read too deep) to transfer that to himself. If this is right, this guy is rich as fuck. Sounds weird for him to be suing the bitcoin devs to get a tenth as much through a hard fork so one can assume he fucked something up along the way and lost the keys to that stuff.
It's like 1.1 million BTC (50 billion USD at current price) right now. That's wild.
Wright finances his activities and lifestyle by getting loans secured by promises of future delivery of this fictional trove. As long as he keeps the con going the money keeps flowing.
It's still ongoing. We have a hearing scheduled for March to challenge the jurisdiction of the UK courts and move to strike out his claims.
Background: Wright has sued a dozen former and current Bitcoin developers, demanding that they publish backdoored Bitcoin software to allow him to take coins which are unambiguously not his, and failing that he demands they pay him roughly $7 billion USD in damages.
Obviously the case isn't even intended to be successful, it's intended to take a long time so that Wright can continue selling shares in Bitcoin he doesn't own and will never have access too, and to harass people who wouldn't aid his fraud in the process.
I think he's doing an interesting attack on the network: the concept is that if you can't sign a transaction then the coins aren't yours. If he can use the legal system to get around that restriction, and actually compel a fork of the bitcoin software and bitcoin network to take possession of them, he's demonstrated a security vulnerability.
Of course, this attack vector would be moot if all miners were anonymous and all contributors to code were anonymous, or if all amounts and addresses were private. Maybe Craig Wright deliberately made the bitcoin blockchain transparent so he could perform this attack later (/s if it's not obvious).
Anyone can create a fork at any time whenever they want. What they can't do is get users to use their fork and call it Bitcoin.
Wright has already attempted this: He has a fork of Bitcoin called "Bitcoin SV" (satoshi's vision) which he claims is the real Bitcoin and that Bitcoin is an imposter. Today it has well under 1% of Bitcoin's hashpower, well under 1$ of Bitcoin's price (and has fallen a LOT relative to Bitcoin), and it's now down to less than 40 reachable nodes. Most of the few exchanges that have ever had it have dropped it, and it has recently had suffered some extremely severe reorg attacks -- causing millions of dollars in losses to at least one exchange.
For the purpose of Wright's backdoor demands miners are irrelevant. If contributors were all anonymous you'd have the problem that they might actually be wright. He's even suing former developers like me, who haven't contributed for a couple years (or more!) ... really the targets of the lawsuit don't have much connection to reality. And the more obscure you make it to get the software the more ability he'd have to just setup impersonation sites to get people to run his malicious version instead.
Also, anonymity hasn't helped that much in the case of the owner of Bitcoin.org-- being anonymous just caused him to lose in a default judgement when Wright sued him because the UK will not allow an anonymous party to defend themselves. Ultimately they'll likely have to deanonymize to prevent Wright from seizing Bitcoin.org.
Addresses being private wouldn't really change anything about Wright's attack. He'd still demand to be given coins just the same. In fact, as of the moment Bitcoin is anonymous enough to severely frustrate his efforts: He claims to "own" 1.1M BTC but right now he's only suing developers for a backdoor to acces 0.111M of it, because whenever he'd claimed specific addresses for more he's gotten nailed by the true owners signing messages. So right now he's only going after a smaller portion where he can be confident the current controlling party won't speak up (the bulk of those coins were stolen from MTGox and haven't moved since).
There's a difference between being an anonymous owner of a domain registered at a central authority which can be compelled to turn over the domain and an anonymous contributor to a codebase which cannot be compelled to modify code if their identity is not known.
The default judgment to me is a flaw in the legal system, if an anonymous party cannot defend themselves, how can an anonymous party be sued? This default judgment is a shame. The proper default judgment should've been "who exactly are you suing?"
He can't demand coins he doesn't even know exist, he can't even prove the coins exist to a court without keys to show that they exist. Being private would absolutely prevent this vector, he'd have to have the keys to prove to a court he owns the coins, which means he wouldn't have to prove anything to a court, he would only have to move the coins.
Interesting vector with impersonation sites, I'll have to roll that one around in my head for a while.
The courts generally will act against anyone within their jurisdiction. In the UK we have the contra mundum injunction, for example, which is a legal order enforceable against the world. These orders occur occasionally in things like witness protection (noone may name this person) and narrower 'persons unknown' ones in the context of public protest (you can get an injunction against whoever has tied themselves to your development site, for example, without having to find out their names first).
The common thread is that they are defendable against, but not without potentially losing your anonymity. So someone can turn up to contest the injunction against the protestors, but whether their name is made public is then in the hands of the judge (public justice normally means that parties names are in the public domain). Likewise, the anonymous contributor could show up to make a case (the court will have tried reasonably hard to effect service so they're aware) but at significant risk to their anonymity, which is only going to be defended by the judge on public interest grounds, not simply because the contributor would prefer it.
While this can lead to harsh outcomes, it's not completely without sense. 'I'm hiding, you can't sue me' creates a hole for lawless behaviour, and the legal system is more or less intended to stop that kind of thing.
I think it would generally be just to allow the anonymous defendant to at least make a motion to strike out the claims while preserving their anonymity.
In this case we have a lot of reason to believe that the plaintiff brought the case exclusively to learn the defendants identity. E.g. Before bringing the action they offered $10 million dollars to acquire the domain, and have made threatening remarks. Not to mention no actual advantage is gained by removing the Bitcoin whitepaper from a single website, as there are easily found mirrors on thousands of locations all over the world, and since Wright's initial threats that includes the websites of several national governments, US congress, research institutions, and some of the largest financial institutions in the world (e.g. Fidelity).
This privacy invasion belief was only furthered when after the case the plaintiff refused to accept the ordered costs payment from anyone except the defendant and only if they identified themselves (also, after the case the plaintiff pretty much said as much).
Their case was seriously deficient too, e.g. falsely misstating that a US copyright registration was evidence of authorship even when the copyright office had made an unprecedented move of saying exactly the opposite in the matter of this specific case. Failing to disclose that there were other copyright registrants, failing to disclose that the supposedly infringing whitepaper was distributed under the MIT license and so on. Not to mention that there were major equitable issues, e.g. the whitepaper has been on the website pretty much since it was written some 13 years ago without issue-- placed there by its (actual) author.
Cobra wrote a letter to the judge and attended the hearing via zoom, and the judge took the position that he was required by the law to ignore the letter.
But at the end of the day the UK courts are powerless to protect cobra from harassment or even assassination so exposing his identity just didn't make sense. Particularly since Cobra is outside of the UK (or so I believe, no one in the bitcoin ecosystem seems to know cobra by any other identity).
And this is why you can't access the Bitcoin whitepaper at its original location or download the bitcoin software on bitcoin.org from within the UK today.
They're now seeing an additional nearly million usd worth of costs for their unopposed default judgement too. O_o
I think I agree at least about a motion to strike out. There's a chance that an abuse of process argument could have been made, though if that failed the existence of the US copyright registration does seem to at least raise issues of fact (about Wright's ownership and/or the meaning in US law of a copyright registration, as foreign law is often a matter for expert evidence) that would need a trial.
For me, the question is not so much whether the respondent should be anonymous from the legal system (I think fairly clearly not) but whether there should be a scope of anonymity from the claimant and the public (a reasonable case here, I think, as none of the copyright issues really turn on the respondent's identity) and whether the application could be made without putting the identity on record first. And the High Court, against a deep pocketed opponent, without my own legal team, is not an ideal venue to try to find out. And, depending on Cøbra's opsec, it may be that they would be exposable via a third-party Norwich Pharmacal order anyway :-/
The costs are really in the same problem space as the main claim, I think: an application for costs to be assessed would probably dramatically lower the amount 'reasonably' due - but that would mean appearing as a party. [edit: not to say it wouldn't be ruinously expensive anyway - I see the summary assessment of costs up to summary judgment already runs to £35k. The High Court is not cheap.]
> For me, the question is not so much whether the respondent should be anonymous from the legal system (I think fairly clearly not) but whether there should be a scope of anonymity from the claimant and the public
The tricky thing here is that what Cobra needs isn't protection from the public, -- which would be hard to provide with any reliability but at least is conceptually not challenging, but privacy from the plaintiffs -- because he has a reasonable fear that the plaintiffs will use the information in some criminal way to harm him.
(Also because in another case Wright went ahead and publicly disclosed the identity of a confidential witness that the court had sealed, and Wright suffered no consequence for it.)
I think privacy from the plaintiffs is harder conceptually, because there may come some point where there needs to be a factual argument that depends on their identity-- certainly the plaintiffs would push as hard as they could in whatever direction they needed to accomplish that-- including, based on prior conduct, forging documents to support a false narrative.
[One of the reasons we think they've been trying to get Cobra's identity-- beyond just threatening him with it-- is that we know wright has told people that Cobra "stole" bitcoin.org from him, but since he knows nothing about who cobra is or how he ended up in control of Bitcoin.org he can't fake up any documentary support for this fiction.]
It's unclear if they could obtain Cobra's identity from a third party. They certainly tried pretty hard. When they were trying to obtain my address they used a storm of pretexting phone calls and such. At least they tried very hard, and were unsuccessful absent an order.
Yeah, indeed, Cobra has the same problem with costs-- he's having a difficult time within the legal framework of challenging them without exposing his identity.
> owner of a domain registered at a central authority which can be compelled to turn over the domain and an anonymous contributor to a codebase
Agreed. But imagine that there is no normie accessible place on the web to get non-malicious Bitcoin software. And anyone running a site distributing it is at risk if their identity is leaked. What effect is that going to have in the long run?
"There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept." -- Bitcoin would survive in such a state, but I don't think it would be a great outcome.
> The default judgment to me is a flaw in the legal system, if an anonymous party cannot defend themselves, how can an anonymous party be sued? This default judgment is a shame.
Fully agreed.
> He can't demand coins he doesn't even know exist, he can't even prove the coins exist to a court without keys to show that they exist.
He's actually argued that he could just demand the developers issue more coins too. And he doesn't have keys, but that isn't slowing him down!
The big legal flaw he exploits is that if you go to trial it can be extremely expensive (esp in the UK where you pay the other sides legal costs for every failed motion, and wright sticks a whole firm on his case). ... normally the expense of trial is protected against by preliminary motions like summary judgements. But in a summary judgement the court assumes all disputed facts favor the non-movant, and wright fills his cases with forgeries to makeup whatever disputed fact he needs to keep the case going. The huge volume of forgeries which require expert analysis and debunking also add massively to the cost of being in litigation with him. His goal isn't to win (though I'm sure he'd be happy if he did)-- his goal is to burn time and the opponents resources.
> What effect is that going to have in the long run?
This is where we get off in the weeds about the architecture of the internet. Ideally, we would have a decentralized domain registry and everyone would use tools like onion sites for everything. Hopefully that is the outcome, but likely not.
It's profitable for Wright. His litigation is financed by is advanced fee fraud victims who think they're going to score billions worth of Bitcoins. So the more lawsuits Wright can file, the better for him.
If Bitcoin SV is the real bitcoin, why is he so interested in suing people for access to "fake" bitcoin core? /s
>Ultimately they'll likely have to deanonymize to prevent Wright from seizing Bitcoin.org.
I didn't know this was a risk. It would actually be a mild disaster if bitcoin.org was compromised. If Cøbra wants to remain anonymous, one idea is to transfer the domain to one of the current bitcoin devs whose identity is public (and maybe transfer it back once this blows over?) I don't know if it's too late for that, given the domain is already the subject of a lawsuit. The whole situation sounds like a mess. I'm sorry you got wrapped up in it.
> He's even suing former developers like me, who haven't contributed for a couple years (or more!)
Wow that's a shitty move. Have you had to retain a lawyer to deal with this nonsense? I was once sued over some open source software I wrote, because one of the keywords used in the DSL was the same as a completely unrelated trademark. As you can imagine the whole lawsuit was baseless nonsense. Luckily they also sued my employer who happens to be Red Hat and our legal department stomped on the claimant for me.
Yes, we're represented by Bird and Bird in the UK, it's a pretty well respected firm.
Wright is unusually challenging even compared to the more typical litigation trolls, because he puts out a lot of forged documents that make it harder to establish a clear set of facts to kill a case in preliminary motions, which cost a lot of expert time to debunk, and carry a risk that a less technical judge/jury might be snowed by them in spite of expert debunking.
This problem doesn't usually exist because in the long run the forgeries will make him lose... but he's not playing for the long run, he's playing to just keep it going as long as he can.
Fortunately the community and industry has been able to step up and provide financial support, so far. But that doesn't replace the time and stress of dealing with it and only partially addresses the chilling effect.
I heard that he's also just recently sent threat letters for two more unrelated lawsuits (sent by a separate set of shell companies), one alleging that the Bitcoin developers are infringing his "database rights" through their use of the Bitcoin blockchain without his permission, and one alleging that their use of the word "Bitcoin" is "passing off" (how he's going to argue that without a trademark is mystifying to me) and he's been saying in public that he's planning a patent lawsuit too.
I'm reading your write-up of this sorry saga. (Seriously, great good writing and great explanations.) And I'm thinking "If this kind of stuff is going on, am I supposed to take Bitcoin seriously as either a currency or a store of value?"
Well in a very real sense this sideshow is independent of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is gonna keep on chugging whatever clueless nonsense goes along with it. To the extent that this has any real effect at all on _Bitcoin_ it would just be creating varrious headwinds like discouraging new contributions to the software.
This wouldn't be the case for legacy systems that depend on trusted third party authorities.
What it does tell you though is how much nonsense people will treat seriously. The same media that is misreporting on Wright's litigation is also the same media saying that Bitcoin is a big deal. :)
I actually think in this case it basically is. The court can say those bitcoin are his, but if he doesn't have the wallet he doesn't have the wallet. The only way to get the coins would be to introduce a hard fork that moves those bitcoins, but good luck trying to get a court to mandate every bitcoin miner across the entire world move to a specific peice of software, and then good luck enforcing it. Especially since unlocking those coins would represent about 5% of all the bitcoins ever made.
If whoever "owns" the BTC gets the fork as desired, and then tries to sell the BTC, that will massively decrease the conversion rate to fiat money (like USD). So for everyone in the current network, it is in their best interests for those BTC to remain unspendable in a lost wallet.
The only way a fork would work if the "owner" were to promise most of it to at least 51% of the current miners.
It is correct, but I'd add that the adversarial environment means that if 51% of miners were to collude to take some portion of the money, they'd rather collude to take all the money, which takes away the incentive for anyone to arrange a fork to do this, and if that were going to happen it would be happening all the time.
What would probably actually happen is that such a fork would be obviously illegitimate to users, exchanges, etc and people would use the unforked chain deliberately, and after some hash rate adjustment and delayed block times, the forked chain, even with 51% of the hash rate, would be close to valueless. Miners don't like mining valueless chuck e cheese tokens, so their hash power would return to the broadly accepted network.
This BTW demonstrates a security property of PoW that you don't get with PoS: you can't mine two networks with the same hash power, you have to pick one or the other. If bitcoin were a PoS system, validators could just stake both chains and make a riskless bet on the winning one, and even benefit from both.
Even if you were to bribe 51% of miners it doesn't necessarily "work". You could do this today, let's call this new fork Bitcoin CraigVision. The trouble is convincing people to value Bitcoin CV or consider it "the real" Bitcoin. But it's not obvious to me why I should value Bitcoin CV above Bitcoin just because it has more electricity being burned to mine it (after all, just because someone works harder doesn't make the product of their labor more valuable). And this altcoin would only temporarily have a higher hash rate, until those miners realize people aren't interested in buying their coins, major exchanges aren't listing it, etc. and they go back to wanting to make money by mining Bitcoin.
I suspect it would just go unnoticed, other than to whatever extent he managed to disrupt the Bitcoin Core software project. Wright already has a fork "Bitcoin SV" that most people have just ignored.
Probably because he's one of the least credible people on the planet, and even faked his own PGP key in a desperate attempt to get people to care about his sham.
I wonder if we never find the original keys for this crypto, if he is declared the legal owner he will be able to somehow force ownership of this crypto via some type of forced code change in the Bitcoin blockchain?
Given that $50B are at stake, I could see things getting weird.
There is $0 at stake, because CSW is not Satoshi.
A hard fork to steal coins was his goal all along, with forking Bcash into BSV.
CSW knew he would never convince Bitcoin, so he decided to use the State to force the return of coins that do not belong to him. Only his sycophants in BSV would agree to such treachery.
Which in itself should be more evidence that this man is not Satoshi.
> (I’m not saying they would, I’m saying they could).
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm skeptical that a judge's ruling could force Congress or the President to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles. I don't think that's ever happened, and (as you say) this won't be the time it does.
So you think they'll send ballistic missiles throughout the whole world? Including China, Russia, UK, Germany, France? All of whom have nukes? Good luck with that.
I very explicitly didn’t say they would. I’m saying they could, and implicitly that if America was so inclined it can menace basically anyone and any nation just by pointing at their massive collection of pointy things that hurt.
Yeah, US should actually start engaging in state sponsored terrorism and engage in piracy to make money, it'd be even more profitable than giving a total scammer 50B$ by deploying ICBMs all over the world.
Hopefully the next step is that those coins were in another nation with their own ICBM stockpile so that we can end the whole humanity experiment once and for all.
A court would have to force Bitcoin users and miners to run a patched version of the software that unlocks those coins. Not likely to work; it's in literally every other Bitcoin user's best interest that those 1.1M coins don't move.
> A court would have to force Bitcoin users and miners
In case it's not clear, even if the court did this and was able to enforce it, they would still need to enforce it outside of the country too, where, if I'm not mistaken, the majority of miners are.
Yep, I think it's pretty interesting, with any other "system" or "product", he needs to sue the owner/controller/company behind it to make them change it. With Bitcoin, there is literally nothing and nobody stopping him from creating the fork he wants. Forcing other people to accept currency from, develop on, or mine on that fork is a different story..
No, I'm not. When I say "I'd love to see" I'm of course being facetious. Of course I don't want these individuals (including yourself) to be held liable personally to him. But if he did win, he wouldn't get the coins, and it would demonstrate that bitcoin cannot be forcibly regulated.
Yeah, I'm with you. Sorry for the defensive response!
I confess I replied something through a lens of personal irritation: For years the Bitcoin ecosystem has treated wright like a troll "he just wants attention, ignore him" -- but in doing so it's really enabled his fraud to grow and become a big problem.
So you triggered thought of people switching to a "oh it's good if he obliterates these people, it'll prove Bitcoin is anti-fragile!" ... well, sorry for being cynical. :)
Bitcoin absolutely would survive his attack here, whatever happens. Though it may be a setback, e.g. if it creates a big incentive against people of high capability, integrity, and experience to contributing to maintaining the software.
No need to apologize, it is perfectly understandable. I can imagine how frustrating it is to be personally at risk from this and see what look like callused, detached humorous enjoyment of what is going on. It is funny how ridiculous this is when you can detach yourself from it and observe it externally, but not very funny when you stand to be held personally liable. I'd probably get short too if I were having to go to court over ridiculous bullshit and people were laughing at the ridiculousness of it, even if I could see the humor in it myself.
He might be able to compel contributors to fork the code on his behalf, but he can't force the miners to use that codebase. He cannot compel a fork of the chain, only of the codebase.
What would happen, worst case scenario, is that the "official" codebase gets code included to give him his rightfully owned monies, but an unmolested "fork" would be adopted by the network and continue on as the widely used codebase, probably contributed to by the same people, possibly under pseudonyms to prevent this horse shit in the future.
> He might be able to compel contributors to fork the code on his behalf
The US frowns on compelled speech and compelled labor. :)
> but he can't force the miners to use that codebase.
Miners aren't the relevant party of interest-- users are. He can't force users to adopt a version of Bitcoin that allows blocks which steal coins.
> What would happen, worst case scenario, is that the "official" codebase gets code included to give him his rightfully owned monies
Nah, that wouldn't happen. That repository would be shut off before that would happen, not only for ethical reasons but because anyone who distributed such maliciously backdoored software would be exposed to litigation by everyone else, especially if Wright established that in practice open source developers could be found civilly liable even though their license has a hard bar against that kind of liability.
> but an unmolested "fork" would be adopted by the network and continue on as the widely used codebase
Indeed, there are already many forks and alternative versions.
> probably contributed to by the same people, possibly under pseudonyms to prevent this horse shit in the future
That I doubt. It's not worth it to take the risk of millions of dollars of legal fees to contribute to a volunteer open source project.
Unless you think he's actually Satoshi, he doesn't actually have access to the $50B, so even a 1% wealth tax would require him to pay $500M... which he doesn't have.
What a tosser - I feel bad for the software developers being dragged into this and having to put up a legal defence because he's let his ego trump truth
There are a couple other Satoshi impersonating scammers. None of them are anywhere near as capable at Craig at it, partially because Craig landed such a large source of funding. So if you've got a few tens of millions you'd like to blow there are some scammers you could throw it at that would probably provide the entertainment that you're looking for.
What a complete and total fraud. This guy has so many Bitcoin-related publications wrapped around his finger that it's frankly dizzying. I have no idea what he did to get this far, but the fact that he actually got them to settle in his favor is another testament to how utterly broken the US legal system is.
> but the fact that he actually got them to settle in his favor is another testament to how utterly broken the US legal system is.
He didn't. The jury found him civilly liable for $100 million USD in damages.
They didn't find that he had to hand over half the fictional bitcoins he claimed to have, -- presumably because they rightfully realized it was all a bunch of bullshit.
The fact that both industry and mainstream media articles are all just paraphrases of Wright's press releases is an example of how broken human journalism is these days.
Yep. I think this is close the worst possible ruling for Wright.
If they'd found against him on the other claims at least he'd be able to say that the jury certainly bought into his claim of owning a ton of early Bitcoin. There would have been much more damages, but $100 million or $25 billion will bankrupt him equally either way.
It's beyond disputed; the man can literally sign a message at any point in time that he likes that would definitively prove his claim, and he refuses. This to me is proof positive that he is lying. Someone who built a cryptosystem for artificial digital scarcity, who relied entirely on digital signatures to prove pseudonymous identity would absolutely 100% prove their claim using these methods. Craig Wright is an obvious fraud.
The article is not very informative about the case, I'd love to know more about why some bitcoin mined by satoshi nakamoto, supposedly owned by a man claiming to be satoshi nakamoto, was under the possession of someone else and needed a trial to return possession to him.